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Whatever one’s views on the specifics (and we’ll discuss those later), Jeremy Paxman got one thing right. A beard, like a great work of art or literature, must meet its public fully formed.

Like the stunning art deco pinnacle of New York’s Chrysler building which was constructed in strict secrecy behind thick scaffold, then unveiled with a flourish to the gape-jawed masses, a beard’s unglamorous early stages are rightly not a matter for public consumption.

Indeed, few men whose troublesome adolescences are lived in the public domain go on to be taken seriously as adults, and in this respect a beard and a man are the same.

If faced with those dreadful words: “Are you trying to grow a beard?” you must make an instant choice. Either dispense with it immediately, or return to your private quarters until the work is done.

So what to make of the nation’s most talked-about beard (I am prepared to lend Mr Paxman the honour, temporarily)? If such is his tactic, he would not be the first figure living under the unforgiving glare of the public spotlight to relax his shaving regimen when confronted with what W B Yeats called the sorrows of the changing face.

Already the Paxman beard has been quite correctly described as “gracious” and “avuncular”, words one does not instantly associate with the country’s most feared television combatant. Every politician out there who sleeps each night on some dastardly secret — and there are many — might just do so a little easier now, a reality Mr Paxman will not enjoy.

A broadly positive reaction has greeted his new look, but it was always a gamble. Beards transform faces in different ways. Trotsky’s short goatee turned his soft face into a mask of steely determination. Likewise, it is the sharply pointed triangle of thick dark hair that first leaps out from pictures of the cruel face of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who became the biggest killing machine of the Russian Revolution.

Yet these men serve as false inspiration to countless gents of a certain age who turn to the style in a desperate hope of reasserting angularity upon jawlines cruelly unchiselled by the hand of time — where a slowing down of the metabolism has simply not been countered by the necessary slowing at the buffet table. In such instances, even when the beard is fulsome, the tactic is transparent.

For my own part, and despite my earlier warnings, it was never my intention to grow one. I began merely with stubble, when I was around 25, but have ended where we are today. My grooming regime is very simple — an electric trimmer and occasionally a small brush. I can easily go for a week to 10 days without lavishing any attention up on my growth. If I am travelling, as recently in Ethiopia, I will just let it go, completely, like Leo Tolstoy, a style I’ve occasionally toyed with keeping. On these occasions, when alone or with close friends, I have been known to curl the ends of my moustache into rings.

Actually, the double-headed Roman god Janus may be a more apt comparison than Tolstoy. Janus is usually depicted with generous beards on both of his visages, and for those of us who live lives that look in two directions, a beard can give a man many faces. In Britain, I have been told people encounter my facial hair and see the last Emperor of Russia. In Russia itself, I’m more likely to be considered a Chechen terrorist or a Hasidic Jew (both comments made by my grandmothers, concerned I might be beaten up or arrested). In a North African souk recently people kept shouting “Ali Baba! Ali Baba!” at me, which is a little surprising given I was probably the only non-Arab there.

But a beard has its practical advantages too. British soldiers fighting the battle for hearts and minds in Afghanistan’s remote villages were advised to grow beards before entering tribal villages, a fact I recalled as I approached Ismail Haniyeh, the delicately bearded leader of Hamas in Gaza last year.

Either way, one hopes Mr Paxman is aware of a crucial fact. Now that it is established, and for the most part liked, he must carry his beard through to the end. A beard must never be a slave to the fickle vagaries of fashion. Those who wear them fleetingly never command respect. Even for such luminaries as David Beckham or Brad Pitt, their flirtations with facial hair will be remembered as distinct troughs in their varying sartorial tides. A beard is nothing less than the rock on which the wave of fashion breaks.

The Greek historian Thucydides famously said of his work that it was “not done to meet the tastes of the immediate public but to last for ever”. Little is, in fact, known about the man’s appearance, but history has assigned him a facial appendage both full and luscious, and these facts cannot be unconnected.

Evgeny Lebedev is the owner of the Evening Standard and The Independent newspapers. Follow him on Twitter: @mrevgenylebedev